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Hero
On a cold winter night in 78
he drank two liters of Russian tea,
went to the Red Square before light
and wrote on snow: “Brezhnev is an idiot!”
He was my god, my hero, my model world.
I imagined him struggling with his fly
when, busted by police, he had managed
to end the sentence with an exclamation mark.
Imagine doing something like this
nowadays.
Imagine a hero dressed in a short sheepskin coat
standing in the piercing wind, his pants pulled down.
“Gross!” you’ll say and will be wrong.
Sometimes truth necessitates madness, and
beauty is hidden
behind obscure details. To tell you the truth,
I’m still jealous of him who shed his urine
in the imperial garden of snow and laughed in the face
of the guards. Nothing beats in my eyes
a jester, his smile full of broken teeth.
When times in the yard are full of lies,
why sing like a nightingale in the emperor’s cage?
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Katia Kapovich is a bilingual poet writing in
English and Russian. She is the well-known author of four
collections of Russian poetry.
British poet and translator Richard McKane is currently
translating Kapovich’s Russian work into English. These
translations appear in McKane’s anthologies, Poet for
Poet (Hearing Eye: London, 1998) and Surviving the
Twentieth Century: Ten Russian Poets (Anvil Press
Poetry: London, 2003).
Kapovich’s collection of English language poetry is Gogol
in Rome (Salt: Cambridge, U.K., 2004).
Her English poems have also appeared in the
London Review of Books, The New Republic,
Jacket, Ploughshares, The Independent,
The American Scholar, The Antioch Review,
Harvard Review, Stand, The Dark Horse,
The Massachusetts Review, and numerous other
periodicals, and have been anthologized in Poetry 180
(Random House, 2003). She was the 2001 recipient of the
Witter Bynner Fellowship from the US Library of Congress.
Kapovich belonged to a literary dissident
movement, emigrated from the USSR in 1990, and currently
lives in Cambridge, MA, where she co-edits,
Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics. |
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